Building Apps

TRANSCRIPT: Intro: 0:01 Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, the podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them. We'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace. Richard Miles: 0:39 There's an app for that. That's what we're going to be talking about on Radio Cade this morning and this morning I have with me Marlana Armstrong and Nahu Alula on our podcast and welcome to the show. Marlana Armstrong: 0:49 Thanks for having us. Nahu Alula: 0:51 Thank you. Richard Miles: 0:51 So before I ask you about yourselves and sort of how you arrived at your company and what you're doing, Marlana, could you tell me a little bit about, first of all, what is it and what does it do? Marlana Armstrong: 1:03 Sure, so Modernized Mobile is an app development company. That's what we primarily focus on, but we also do software development and Web Platforms, AKA websites and essentially every app that we do is going to be very different, but we want to help businesses engage with their clientele. We want to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life so everybody has got a good idea, right? And apps are on everybody's phone essentially if you've got a smartphone. So the best way to enact a new idea is to put it on an app and see how it takes off. Richard Miles: 1:38 Great. Um, okay. So we're going to talk later about the specific apps or maybe some of the types of clients you have, but first I'd like to know a little bit about the two of you and how you ended up doing this for what your past work towards this company. So Marlana why don't we start with you. Where'd you grow up and what was your childhood like? Education and that sort of stuff. Marlana Armstrong: 2:00 All the fun stuff, yeah. I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Uh, all throughout high school. I love debate and public speaking and just spending my weekends talking about worldly topics that had a pro and a con and I was going to tell you which one was right, so that was my favorite thing to do for sure. Had a great family, just my mom and my dad and myself. Few dogs here and there. Richard Miles: 2:24 And what made you choose the University of Florida? Marlana Armstrong: 2:26 So it's kind of funny. For a while I was very resistant. I was like, everybody from my high school is going to UF, I'm not going and I wanted to be a broadcast journalist for quite awhile and I decided on UCF because they were close to Disney and Disney owns ESPN, so why not? But I ended up deciding on UF because it's the number one public school in Florida. It was the obvious choice and my mom was not going to let me attend a subpar college. Uh, not to put down UCF, UCF's a great school. Richard Miles: 3:02 For our non-Florida listeners UCF is University of Central Florida in Orlando. That is a good school and it's growing quite a bit. But you decided on University of Florida in Gainesville. Marlana Armstrong: 3:10 Yes, I did. Richard Miles: 3:10 Did you already know what you wanted to study when you got here or did you decide after you arrived? Marlana Armstrong: 3:15 I was still stuck on journalism, but then actually my second week of school I was taking a climate change... the science and solutions course and I learned about the major that's provided called Sustainability and the Built Environment. It's in the College of Design, Construction and Planning. And that is where my passions really lie because how we've been doing things for a long time is not sustainable, it's not long lasting and there are millions of ways that we can change our habits, the materials we use, how much of our resources that we use. And I mean apps actually fall right into that because you're not using paper anymore. None of what we do is really on paper other than jotting down a few notes here and there. Everything is web based. So that in itself is a pretty sustainable solution. So that's where my passions lie. Richard Miles: 4:05 Nahu you're from Atlanta. So, uh, did you grow up in Atlanta? Nahu Alula: 4:08 Yes, I'm born and raised in Atlanta, Decatur to be exact, but they're the same thing basically. Richard Miles: 4:13 And what brought you to Gainesville? Nahu Alula: 4:15 So University. So I... during my applications for college, I applied to probably 10, 20 schools and University of Florida actually wasn't on my radar because in Georgia we have an equivalent scholarship of the Bright Futures called the Hope scholarship and it's basically the same thing. So for, for me going to University of Georgia pretty much took the cake from going to University of Florida, but Florida offered me a really good scholarship and UGA didn't have an engineering program at that time so it was either Georgia Tech then or University of Florida, but I remember Georgia tech had crazy amounts of horror stories of 89 percent of people losing that Hope scholarship within two years and... Richard Miles: 4:57 Oh, really? Nahu Alula: 4:57 And it's just very rigorous to get through and that's because Georgia Tech is like a top three, top four engineering perennial engineering school for years running. Whereas MIT and Cal Tech take the number one spot, so they kind of have what I consider like the "they have to prove themselves" school, so they've kind of pushed their students more rigorously. Richard Miles: 5:12 And did you know from the get go that you wanted to go into engineering? Nahu Alula: 5:15 So I was, I knew I wanted to do something math oriented and science because my whole family is very math / science oriented, but I wasn't 100 percent sure and I did want a social life. So that ruled out Georgia Tech and then UGA didn't have engineering. So then naturally the University of Florida seemed like a safe bet. Richard Miles: 5:34 So you anticipated my next question I was going to ask both of you, any of your parents or siblings go into information technology or engineering... that general field? Nahu Alula: 5:42 Well my dad is a biostatistician for the CDC. Um, yeah. So he's very much science... Richard Miles: 5:48 Which is headquartered in Atlanta. Nahu Alula: 5:49 Yes, correct. So he's very much... math and science. Um, and in my opinion, the most difficult of all the academic disciplines is statistics, bar none. So he's seen the highest levels of that, but nothing like digital or technical information relating to really. Richard Miles: 6:07 Marlane, how about you? Marlana Armstrong: 6:08 Sure. So every tech company, you have to have multiple roles. Right. And so my primary role is business development, marketing and sales of that sort. So my mom, she is the director of marketing at this company called Solera and she does automotive marketing and so she definitely opened my eyes to that aspect of the world and then joining forces with Nahu I've definitely been able to engage in that tech side, um, and learn a little bit more about IT services. Richard Miles: 6:38 So when you have marketing questions, do you call up your mom or does she offer you unsolicited advice and you say "No, I got it." Marlana Armstrong: 6:44 Oh yes, definitely. She has been a huge help and a big supporter of everything that I do. Richard Miles: 6:50 So let's talk a bit about Modernized Mobile now. It's just a company that you joined or did you found? And then tell me how it got started. Nahu Alula: 6:58 So, um, I've been coding really for over 10 years. Really, I fell in love with coding in my AP Computer Science class in high school. And from there I've just been exploring a lot of security testing and penetration testing and network security. And stuff like that, about three or four years ago, I caught wind of this thing called the Gainesville Dev Academy run by Duncan Kabinu and Kevin Robertson. And after contacting them we found a way to get me into that class and it was a fast track class for iOS coding, Swift and we had two excellent professors for about three and a half months, five nights a week for 3 - 4 hours a night. And we learned Swift, it was a crash course test and Swift and a lot of the third party softwares and stuff that go along. And a couple months after that I assembled a team of engineers and statisticians, statistic students who were near me and we had three or four co-founders at that time. And at that time, it was the beginning of the summer, I also was in this program called Startup Quest of which I was in the same group with Marlana and Marlana was kinda leading the entire group and she presented for us, lead the business plan... That program, by the way, was where we had to spend 10 weeks creating a mock business plan for a mock company that was based on real research and ours was based on ovarian cancer and a rare protein that had been able to be used to diagnose it in stage one and Marlana crushed the whole presentation and the business plan and I was really in awe of her and I asked her if she would grace us and be part of the company and the startup. She's basically a co-founder because it was right after the fledgling stages is when she joined and then right when Marlana came in, she provided us with a massive spark and we have never looked back since. Richard Miles: 8:35 Wow, if you ever need anybody to do a eulogy or say... Great. Okay. Here you sound pretty awesome. So Marlana, so this is really kind of cool. It's sort of a testament to the Gainesville startup culture. I mean Gainesville, Dev Academy, Startup Quest those are all sort of relatively recent. Certainly when I grew up in Gainesville in the eighties, we had nothing like that and Gainesville startup culture didn't really begin really until probably about a dozen years ago, so it's great that we're starting to see, coming out of the pipeline, companies like yours. Modernized Mobile, so if I understand it correctly, you have companies that come to you in any field or in any sector and they say, hey, we need an app for our business or our organization, or do you limit yourself to a sector? Nahu Alula: 9:20 Absolutely. Right now we are in every industry that you can think of. We don't turn down because we're all purpose developers, software and apps, so our skills lie in whatever you can think of. So that's any industry, medical, business, banking, securities and everything. Marlana Armstrong: 9:33 On that note, I kind of like to use a metaphor because we're a good and a service company, but a plumber for example, he's not going to turn down a residential home to do the plumbing for just because he normally does commercial buildings, right? So an app company, we're not going to turn down anybody who has an app idea because we're not going to restrict ourselves to any sort of market or industry because every industry could use an app. Richard Miles: 10:01 When you have clients that call you up, how many of them know what they want or how many of them just simply say "I know apps are important and I know I need one" but they really have no idea what their business is going to use the app for. Are you the first line of defense against clients who don't know what they want? Marlana Armstrong: 10:18 Uh, generally I would say I'm the point of contact for walking them through what the process is going to be like. I'll definitely help them in understanding what features could be most beneficial for them. I would say Nahu, and I do a lot of that on a day to day basis. Realistically, most people don't know what they want out of an app even though they know the general features that are in an app. We're working with somebody right now who is just kinda like "Hey, I don't have a business name, I don't have a logo, I don't have anything, but I know I want an app, so can you build it?" And I'm like, "Of course we can." So we've also kind of become like a business startup kit too. We have helped a lot of entrepreneurs who have a great idea for an app and want to revolve a business around that app, but haven't started their LLC. They haven't become incorporated. They haven't thought of a logo, things like that. So we kind of help our clients through that process as well. Nahu Alula: 11:12 Yeah, I would say the vast majority do not have the full plan ready. They may have some centralized or focal point feature that they know that they want, but... Richard Miles: 11:20 It seems to me too the way that people are interacting with technology has changed because I remember the first version of businesses that interacted with the Internet... it's all about having a great website. And it strikes me that maybe that is changing now. Do you find some of your clients is like "To heck with a website... I need an app, but you know, a website's not really going to do me any good." What is your advice to those clients? Do you agree with them or? Marlana Armstrong: 11:44 I would say that a lot of our clients still think that they need a website, although websites are simply a little bit less effective in providing the information directly to your client's hands, right? Like if you... if a client downloads your businesses app, you're able to send them push notifications, so little alerts that will constantly on a day to day basis let you know "Hey, we have a new update." Or "Hey, we're doing a sale." "Hey we've got some coupons for you." And in that way you're engaging them more whereas a website just stands there and you only hope that people fall upon it. Richard Miles: 12:20 Right. Kind of passive, right? It can be interactive obviously, but an app by its very definition is... Nahu Alula: 12:26 Yeah, definitely. I would say though the, um, the website industry is by far the most similar to the app industry, but what made that website bubble burst was the advent of the automation tools that made website creation so easy. So just knowing html didn't command six figure salaries anymore and that exact same thing is going to take place with apps, but because apps are much more sophisticated, they have a front end and back end, an API and much more variability, that bubble burst will be significantly longer to take place. Richard Miles: 12:54 So this is more of a technical question it's where I betray my own ignorance about your field so you can either laugh at this question or answer, but it seems to me that apps are probably themselves going to be challenged by evolving, as you said, artificial intelligence. Just a small example: I recently got some Apple Airpods right and excited that I can now tap my Apple Airpods and tell Siri to do something. And then it occurred to me like, "Oh, I don't have to now get my phone out of my pocket all the time to do something. I'm just telling Siri to do it for me." How is that going to affect the app industry? Nahu Alula: 13:30 Uh, gigantically. So that... Richard Miles: 13:32 Good, it was a good question. Nahu Alula: 13:33 Yeah, absolutely. So that's in the category of machine learning, which is still very much in the kind of theoretical stage. Um, a lot of people try to like boast that they have these services and stuff, but it's still very theoretical. Only a few people are doing very lightweight... Richard Miles: 13:46 In Indiana. I was still telling my app to do something. Nahu Alula: 13:49 Yes, exactly. But the issue with it is that there's no way around kind of brute forcing the triage of all the different kinds of scenarios. So you're coding the AI but it's just very tedious and so they're trying to figure out a way to make that process faster because now a lot of projects now can literally take years to complete. Richard Miles: 14:10 Um, Marlena. This is obviously a crowded field, right? I mean there are a lot of companies out there that will build somebody an app. How many clients do you have that are not in Gainesville? Marlana Armstrong: 14:20 Well, we've got one client who's out in Chicago. We've got a few people dispersed throughout Florida, so not just Gainesville, but I would say that the value proposition for Modernized Mobile is that we've got a team who will talk to you all the time. You know, there's a lot of tech companies who will just give you an app or give you a website and say, "Okay, hope you like it. Goodbye." Whereas we maintain the app, we make sure that you're marketing it well, we make sure that you're promoting it the right way because our team isn't just developers. We've got an entire social media marketing team. We've got an entire design team that can work with you on your logo, on your color scheme and things like that. So I would say that we are definitely a company that fills every hole that you could possibly run into and in that way we're just a full service company as opposed to just IT and tech. Richard Miles: 15:10 Do you have plans to expand or... what's kind of your near term goals? I guess in the next say year and 18 months? Nahu Alula: 15:17 Right now we have a couple team members who are establishing a branch in Miami, of which we're pipelining a lot of our development to and from, so we're expanding in geography as well as in our services. So we are exploring machine learning as one of our services. We've been testing out a lot of the features in that specifically Core ML, which is a new framework that Apple released that has a lot of like preprogrammed tools as well as Blockchain. We, uh, we have a very strong medical team too we have an electrical engineer and a couple of med students who have been exploring a few software to really help EHR systems which are like electronic health record systems to run more efficiently and safely combined with encryption behind blockchain. Yeah. Richard Miles: 15:57 Interesting. And Modernized Mobile has been around for how long a year? Nahu Alula: 16:01 Fourteen months. Richard Miles: 16:02 Fourteen months. Okay. All right. So that's long enough in the startup culture for you all to sort of be seasoned, seasoned professionals. So when you go to these startup gatherings, whether it's Startup Quest or the various things that are in Gainesville, you'll probably find yourself already being asked questions by other developers or other people who want to start businesses. What are the types of questions you're getting and what's the type of advice that you're dispensing now to other people trying to do something similar? Nahu Alula: 16:26 Well, honestly we get a lot of like competitiveness amongst the local other tech teams, a lot of great developers who kinda show off their design skills and the different languages that they're familiar with and stuff like that. Uh, but for the most part it's been like a healthy kind of steel sharpens steel competition we've faced with a lot of these other tech companies. Marlana Armstrong: 16:47 I would definitely say that throughout the community when we talk about the fact that we did start a business and we've gotten this far and we've been able to brand ourselves, create a reputation that people can turn to and say "Oh yeah, Modernized Mobile. They created my app. They're a great company and they got a great team," I genuinely have seen a lot of admiration just because we are young people and we are creating a company while also managing other team members while also figuring out community events we need to go to and how we're going to start getting federal grants and things of that nature that are definitely a bit overwhelming. Richard Miles: 17:23 I think there's a common, maybe a common misconception that startup particularly IT companies are just a bunch of coders, right? But I think you can probably tell us, Marlena, that that's not just coding, right? For the company to thrive you need different skillsets. So tell me a little bit about who are the other team members that you've absolutely got to have. If you really are serious about making the company grow. Marlana Armstrong: 17:46 Surprisingly and not surprisingly, you need a social media team. You need to be promoting your company because just having developers and engineers does not get your name out and it does not promote just how big your capacity is and how great you can be. Um, so social media team is definitely necessary. We've also run into the fact that graphic design is huge with mobile apps and websites. Regardless, you need it to look good. People aren't gonna use it if it doesn't look good, and so honestly even as a role that I've started to take on is just learning graphic design. I don't have a certificate in graphic design, but I sure can create an app slide that's going to look great and so acquiring those different skills just to fill those different holes and roles is really great and then you also need a good marketing team because social media, it's there, but you need somebody to promote it and boosting it on facebook is not generally the only way that you want to go about that. You do want to talk to people and market it through TV and newspaper and print however you want to do it, and then those people can see your web presence, so they are now seeing that, oh, you have a physical presence and you have this digital presence that's really strong. You've got a lot of depth and things like that. Richard Miles: 19:00 Yeah. Our exposure... or my exposure to the startup culture, certainly in Gainesville, is to this eye opening realization that particularly the IT companies or the software companies really need a strong set of this sort of classical liberal arts skills as well. The communication, you know, people who are strong writers, people who are strong graphic designers. I mean I'm sure there are whole skits of this, right? Engineers trying to explain what they do and it's the temptation to explain in engineering terms is so strong that it's really hard, I think, for companies that don't have that skill set to address a much wider audience in which people who really don't give a damn about the code, they just want to know what is this going to do for my business, for my life, etc. Nahu Alula: 19:39 Absolutely. You know, As a kid you grow up. You think that you're going to be this people's person and then very smart and then just very well versed, but the truth is in order to become these kinds of savant of technical genius and stuff, you have to dedicate so much of your time to these disciplines and studies that you lose the ability to keep your social skills sharp and so it's very rare that you'll find somebody who has the ability to do the technical side and then the business side and that's literally what I've found taking place. Those people are very rare. Even though a lot of people would deny that. Marlana Armstrong: 20:07 I'm going to embarrass Nahu a little bit. I will commend him for being one of those people who can do the engineering and can also do the business. I mean originally when we first started this and we would go to meetings, he would definitely get very technical and I would kind of like tap him on the knee and like indicate that I'm going to take over now because we're losing them because their eyes are glossing over and they don't really know what we're talking about. So there was definitely a good balance between he and I for bringing it back to the real world, simple terms, essentially just making it more layman and helping him give him a break from talking for so long. Richard Miles: 20:43 I think the message is, from what I've seen, particularly in the startup community here, is a message has been received loud and clear, but sometimes too much we see in the Cade Prize competition we'll get teams pitching ideas and they spend the first five minutes saying how they're going to change the world and at minute six you go like "But what is it?" They've almost gone too far in the other direction. Like, "You know, this hazy rosy, wonderful future in which no one will suffer." Like, "Okay, but I still have no idea what it is." Marlana Armstrong: 21:11 Finding that balance is... Richard Miles: 21:12 Yeah, it's important. Well great. I'm glad to see that you all are making a go of this. It sounds like it has a lot of promise. Hope to have you back on the show after you're silicon millionaires and billionaires and we're hitting you up for donations but Marlana and Nahu, thanks so much for joining us. Marlana Armstrong: 21:25 Thank you so much. Nahu Alula: 21:26 Thank you. Outro: 21:29 Radio Cade would like to thank the following people for their help and support. Liz Gist of the Cade Museum for coordinating and inventor interviews. Bob McPeak of Heartwood Soundstage in downtown Gainesville, Florida for recording, editing and production of the podcasts and music theme. Tracy Collins for the composition and performance of the Radio Cade theme song featuring violinist Jacob Lawson. And special thanks to the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville, Florida.